Call to Arms
by DoctorWholigan
Summary: Gaunt and the Tanith First-and-Only are, yet again, stuck on a planet that nobody else wants to defend. Only this time, the Chaos they're fighting is even more unnatural than usual... (StarCraft/WH40K/Primarch)


Sergeant Mik Varl was alive. He didn't particularly like the feeling. What few flashes of comprehension lanced through to his clouded consciousness introduced him to a whole new level of pain. His entire body ached dully, yet he felt strangely removed, like some foreign observer watching the hurt through a window. The whole experience was being faded by  his addled senses, yet it failed to take the edge off the raging, primal sense of _wrongness_. If death would release him from this nameless, unquantifiable suffering, he would welcome it.

        Against his wishes, death ignored Varl. Slowly gathering his wits, the dazed Guardsman's shocked brain was trying to release into his body the simple imperative to _get up_. Varl gritted his teeth and fought the bile rising in his throat, trying to raise his head. The world swam around him and he passed out again.

        Whether he came around seconds, hours or days later, Varl had no way of knowing. Forcing his body to cooperate he fought the resolve to stand again. Slowly, as if they hadn't been used in centuries, his fingertips trickled back to him. They ached, too. Groping blindly, they began feeding Varl with information. He was in mud, on his back; the thick, sucking mire effectively trapped him like a fly in ointment. Supposing this was the same mud he had fallen on, then he was still on Crithea, a boring, dismal little jungle planet of no worth to anybody but the higher echelons of power Varl would never communicate with.

        Realisation flooded to him along with memory; the veil over his awareness flew off, and he was left free to think again. The unsure, doubtful ache which had been his only companion returned full force, developing into straight agony. Worse, the near-freezing muck threatened to engulf him completely, chilling needles stabbing him through to the bone. Above him, as Varl's too-blue eyes adjusted to the pallid light, he could make out the tumultuous, fickle clouds, dark with their punching rain. The limits of his vision revealed bloated leaves on stunted trees, too well fed on the humidity and moisture in Crithea's dank atmosphere. Where the warm, sticky air kissed his face he smelled wisps of ozone, of cordite; the stench of spent rounds. Blood, which he could smell around him. Blood, which tasted metallic in his mouth. Blood oozing lethargically from countless slashes in his dirty jungle fatigues. A smell, a pain he knew well. There had been a battle recently and he, Sergeant Varl, had been part of it.

        There had been nothing, he remembered, not a single sign of the coming trouble. Somewhere back in the sprawling Imperial trenchworks, which straddled the Crithean bog like the legs of a drunken spider, a field cooker would be sitting on stilts, out of the muck, boiling a pot of caffeine. He had been brewing it for himself, Dorden and Mad Larkin, who had long since plunged into the dense undergrowth with his custom-fitted longrifle. The smell alone would draw him back. Dorden, though, the oldest in the regiment by at least thirty years, couldn't stand straight caffeine. Varl had been prowling the trenches in search of Corbec, who almost always had a bottle of alcoholic sacra around him. He would give anything for Dorden. The old medic had been a general practitioner before being drafted to the Tanith First-and-Only; he had delivered Colonel Colm Corbec, and the shaggy Guardsman loved Dorden as much as the next Tanith man.

        He was a reminder of home. Tanith. A lost world. A dead world.

        Jerked back to the present by a fresh weal of pain, Varl decided anything was better than focusing on the sensation burning through his lean body; on retrospect, he would compare it to having fallen on a crate of rusted bayonets. Any distraction was welcomed by the intert Guardsman. Several of his ribs had been shattered, he decided, clinically, before letting the chill of the marsh ebb his thoughts again, oddly soothing.

        Corbec had left his bunker -- bunker was a relative term, a catch-all for burrows excavated into trench walls where water and silt collected shin deep. Many a rat had drowned in the bunkers. Varl supposed the Colonel had gone to see Gaunt about something. Commissar-Colonel Ibram Gaunt, the hated, wonderful man that the Ghosts of Tanith owed their lives to. They were Gaunt's Ghosts. Clutching an illuminated data-slate between thick bionic fingers, Varl made for the doorway when Chaos descended on the Imperial defenders.

        Literally.

        The distinct snap-hiss of lasguns shrieked sporadically. Blazing red tracer fire tore through the air over Varl's head. He was not dazed, though; he was prepared for war, and had been so since the Founding. The chunky conglomerate of metal the Sergeant called an arm cast the data-slate to the hungry mud, where it fizzed out and died. He would have the tech-priests say a prayer for the arcane device later. Now, he was more concerned with his own wellbeing.

        Huddling down against the battlements, the Tanith Guardsman took a bead on what his men were firing at. It was female -- definately. Both a sensuous fantasy and a terrifying horror, the unspeakable beauty danced amongst the las-fire; shots flicked ineffectively from her bony, wasted wings, singed her already tattered green catsuit. Varl muttered the Litany of Protection, invoked a few Tanith charms, and opened fire on it.

        A bone-shattering noise thumped rhythmically into the trench, threatening to destroy his eardrums. Varl didn't have to look behind him to know it was Trooper Bragg,  the Tanith giant probably toting some enourmous weapon that had formerly been attached to a tank. The female daemon didn't so much as flinch -- if indeed, any of Bragg's wild shots struck home. Smoke belched from the huge weapon's muzzle and empty shells streamed from the breech, splashing into the trench. The daemon disappeared. Quite simply vanished. Varl stopped firing, keeping his finger firm on the trigger. He would bet a lifetime supply of sacra that she had not actually gone. Bragg seemed to share the opinion, letting his heavy bolter pepper the space she had vacated a few more seconds.

        It took an eternity by Varl's reckoning for her to show her gleeful, blood-soaked face again. It was actually three seconds before Feygor, perhaps fifty metres down the line, began to scream. A fierce, bony presence had made itself known through his chest cavity. Varl raced over the slippery boards laid in the trench; Bragg's gun roared again. She had appeared in a forward firing pit, lurking under a thin layer of camo netting -- one which Major Rawne was trying to vacate as quickly as his scrabbling limbs would allow in what purchase they could make on sludgy ground. Varl saw why the handsome Tanith had run a moment later. The pit exploded, the trenches shook. A towering orange inferno burst into the air as every tube-charge in the pit detonated in one furious reaction. Slivers of storage crates and flak-board drizzled down, stinging Varl's exposed arms and neck.

        Still, the unfathomabe evil refused to fall, as she had made so many Tanith. She coughed once as smoke billowed around her, dramatically. She probably hadn't felt a thing, thought Varl, bittery. "That actually tickled," she quipped in piercing notes, then went back to showering herself in gore.

        The death cries of men were cut off before they could become full-throated screams as the deadly beauty tore them into pieces with her rending wings. Despair gripped Varl's chest in a crushing, choking vice. He fell to his knees in silt, shaking violently. Bragg shouted something encouraging but the words were lost over his gnashing bolter. The Sergeant could stand no more. The men of Tanith, the First-and-Only, Gaunt's Ghosts, victorious against heretics, aliens and Chaos on countless worlds, had finally come across an enemy that no man could hope to face.

        Except for Gaunt. A brief moment of clarity flashed as Bragg stopped firing, thrusting his fist into the air as if already victorious. "For the Emperor! For the Colonel-Commissar!" Varl looked up from the lasgun quivering in his hands and caught sight of Gaunt, flanked by Colonel Corbec and the boy, Brin Milo, leaping and cavorting from the death she was dealing out around them. Hope sparked afresh watching Gaunt parry the daemon's blows with his chainsword, the blade singing against her calcerous carapace. Brin lifted his pipes and began to play, a firm, drilling march, stirring the men of Tanith to rally. Varl would. Adrenaline surged into his veins.

        "Men of Tanith, do you want to live forever?! To me!" The Commissar's lean, angled face hissed defiance at the abomination, goading her into pressing her attack, overextending her reach. _Daring_ her to kill him, even. Gaunt's Tanith cloak whipped behind him in tatters and his black storm coat was slick with blood, but his staunch, implacable appearance went only to reenforce Varl's belief. She could be beaten. Would be, with a force like Gaunt on their side. Right in the thick of the carnage, Gaunt bared his teeth, rivulets of blood and ichor dribbling down his face from a gash above his eye. For a brief moment, Varl saw only the Commissar. He was War.

        Varl drew his long, silver Tanith blade, fixing it to his lasgun with practised, nimble fingers. He planted a rough kiss on the still-warm barrel and burst from his crouching position, roaring as loudly as his throat would allow. Around the screaming Sergeant, the rest of the Ghosts joined in with him. They rushed the nightmare with bayonets fixed, leaping over the battlements to meet it in the open. Gaunt took the lead, his firm voice rising above them all, encouraging the men with Litanies and Scriptures.

        Dozens, hundreds of men swarmed around Varl, eager and willing to crush this foe of Imperial might. The swathe of bodies crushed each other against her and the direction changed; it became _pieces_ of men whirling through the air around Varl, the sky thick with their blood. He stopped. The daemon was staring down at him. Brilliant blue-green eyes sparkled with nothing but the singular, malevolent intent to scatter Varl's body into the wind. He stabbed out lamely, she deflected with the barest flick of her haenous wings.

        Crithea bucked violently under his feet; the sodden dirt rushed up to meet his back with a violent thump. Dazed, Varl tried to stand, but his arm felt heavy, more leaden than the norm. Other men were running, dying around him, but the perspective was wrong. Battered combat boots and abused fatigue trousers were running past him. Troopers trampled mud onto Varl's face; they thought he was dead. Fighting the growing sense of weight in his bionic shoulder, the Tanith Sergeant turned to inspect his prosthetic limb, and began to scream desperately. Through the joint, nestled snugly between two vital servo motors, the jagged tip of one wasted, warped wing stapled him to the soupy bog. Again, he screamed, pleading with the fleeting snatches he could see of Gaunt's coat.

        Varl stopped wailing when he heard the ship coming. Through the raucous shouting match around him he could hear the plaintive screech of ramjets holding something aloft. It plunged through the cloud cover, a gargantuan steel box with a screen on the cockpit. Not an attractive ship, not an Imperial ship, but it was a troop carrier, and Varl could barely make out that it carried no marks of Chaos. Not like this hell-wench which had pinned him, toying with his life. The enourmous ship strained against its engines, threatening to plummet from the air -- but it held, settling to the mud with its cargo of hope like some overweight angel. Two immense steel doors cracked apart and the ship disgorged her passengers.

        They were definately veterans! Varl fought hard to keep from crying out in joy as the newcomers fanned out methodically. They had black fatigues, black forest caps and gleaming black rifles like nothing he had seen before. Obviously something very top-secret. Blissfully, he smiled. The pain in his shoulder was forgotten; he knew it would be over soon.  The plight of the Ghosts had been answered. The horror towering over him disengaged herself from his prosthetic with a shriek of metal as more delicate machinery was destroyed. With that, she was gone.

        Still, Sergeant Mik Varl could not stand.  Both biological and mechanical components sabotaged his attempts to sit up, numerous fractures mounting with the burning sensation his bionic limb was imparting on him. As the new troopers drew closer, Varl hardly noticed, with dimming comprehension, their bizzare, elongated faces. Gaunt alone broke from the Tanith lines to meet these men -- Varl then noticed the sharply pointed ears sticking from the top of the other Guardsmen's jungle caps. His eyelids blinked disjointedly as the Commissar put out his hand to the tallest of these newcomers. As Gaunt shook his hand, the other commander shook his tail.

        "Dogs with faces," Varl breathed, incredulous, flecking blood onto his lips. Gaunt and the black haired wolf turned, heading back to the Commissar's bunker. With one final, shuddering breath, Varl passed out.

***

The cavernous prayer chamber on board the _Navarre_ posessed a kind of overbearing majesty. Angled steel walls towered up to a perfect apex in the ceiling where muted yellow luminates dangled tantalizingly out of reach, festooned with gemstones and precious metals. Along the bulkhead, at set intervals, huge plinths mounted glittering gold braziers. The chamber faced an outer bulkhead; an enourmous effigy of the Emperor incarcerated in his Golden Throne sat sentry over the mounted columns of steel pews, window-eyes swirling madly with the incandescent energies of warp space outside. The atmosphere was laden with the thick smell of incense not filtered from the recirculated air. If the object of the chamber was to be impressive, than by the estimation of Colonel Paelyn Blaquerocke, platoon commander of the canine reenforcements to the Imperial cause on Crithea, it was doing the job.

        Padded hands clasped peacefully in his lap, Paelyn sat at no particular pew, content to be impressed with the looming grandeur the _Navarre_ exuded. The sheer scale of faith in the Imperium was new to him, and slightly overwhelming. Each sparkling trinket or golden idol seemed -- to his sensibilities -- like a sledgehammer of the Imperial doctrine. Though, he had never had much of a need for faith. His gleaming malachite eyes shifted up to the shrine bearing over him. He picked an inscription, and read it aloud to himself.

        "Let steel armour your flesh; faith, your soul."

        Paelyn Blaquerocke didn't believe in any of that faith crap. Publicly, at least. The times were many he could count when a deity to call upon would have been useful.

        He had discovered the troop facilities on board the _Navarre_ to be similar to all Imperial ships, judging by what his human guides had told him. Spartan was too kind a word for the limits of the cold necessity displayed in the care of men, pushing the limit of the word to the extreme. Desperate to clean the grime from his usually lustrous white fur, the lupine Colonel had shuffled forward in line for hours.

        A shower block with fifty nozzles was intended to support fifteen hundred fighting men.

        He was essentially, as far as the men of Tanith would understand, a walking, talking wolf. Consequently, he had attracted some unguarded stares while he showered; Paelyn shuddered, remembering one filthy example from the shallow end of the gene pool who had possessed the gall to actually proposition the wolf. His shower was done, though, and he was again clean, smelling faintly of the shampoo he insisted on carrying in his pack. A few of the Ghosts had remarked on the femininity of his showering habits. Paelyn simply didn't want to reek of the so-called 'soap' that came standard in the shower block.

        Self-concious of his presence in this foreign world, Paelyn ran his ebony clawtips through his short black hair. Brin Milo cleared his throat anxiously behind him.

        The tall wolf whirled on the boy. "What is it?"

        Brin took a step back, cautiously. "The reports you requested on the shrine world of Ultima Macharius, sir." He held out a lit data-slate.

        Paelyn accepted the slate, jabbing a thumb-claw at one of the glowing runes. The text scrolled past him rapidly. "An entire planet dedicated to the life of one man. What sense does that make to you?"

        "The Lord Solar Macharius liberated over one thousand worlds during his crusade. Nobody has matched his feat yet. He was a great man."

        "He _was_ a great man. Now he's a dead man. One that has somehow managed to take up an entire planet worth of space," huffed the wolf, dropping the slate beside him on the pew.

        "But if you think he's a waste of space, then why did you want to know about Ultima Macharius?" Brin sounded slightly hurt. Paelyn turned again to see the boy's clenched fists at his sides.

        "I'm curious to know what I can about your culture, Milo, I meant no disrespect." Speaking consolately, Paelyn raised a hand to the great edifice. "Emperor absolve me, hmm?"

        Footsteps echoed down the ajoining corridor. Brin knew the hard bark of heels on the unyielding steel deck. Paelyn caught the singular tint of gunpowder on the scent of the coming male. Ibram Gaunt stalked into the chamber, removing his peaked cap  under the golden archway. He ran his fingers quickly through his close-cropped sand hair, hard eyes flicking over the two already present.

        "Brin," said Gaunt, unexpectedly. "I thought you were _my_ adjutant."

        The boy stammered an explanation. "Sir, I was.... data-slate, Colonel..."

        Gaunt silenced Brin with a good-natured cuff around the ears. "Trooper Caffran is roaming the ship on search for you. I believe he has some caper planned involving the Volpone..."

        Smiling, Brin bolted for the exit, glad for the provided excuse to flee the company of the two imposing commanders. Watching his flight, Gaunt sat heavily in the pew behind Paelyn. The Commissar fidgeted with his cap between his knees.

        "Why are you here, Colonel Paelyn Blaquerocke?"

        Paelyn shifted his weight carefully over his tail, hanging one arm over the padded back of the pew. "We responded to a call for reenforcements engaging an unknown enemy. It's what we do; black ops, clandestine warfare. We, uh... weren't expecting to find humans."

        "As we were not expecting animals."

        "Wolves," corrected Paelyn, gravely.

        "And one lion. Bennett. I checked." Gaunt flashed a smirk. "Needless to say, you've attracted the attention of quite some important people."

        "Which?" The wolf lifted another data-slate from the pile littering his pew, flicking claws over the shifting runes on the display. "The Inquisition? The Commissarat? I understand the Ministorium might be interested in dispelling my heretical suggestions to your men."

        "The men of Tanith are solid in their beliefs."

        "They fight for the Emperor."

        Gaunt shook his head, once. "They fight for me."

        A line of jagged white teeth smiled back at the human. Stranger or not, Paelyn was coming to quite like this Gaunt character. "I would say, though, that  your men, your Ghosts, have given the Dogs of War the warmest reception we can expect to receive in the Imperium."

        "Oh, I wouldn't think so." Gaunt stood slowly, letting his arms hang loosely at his sides. "We're on our way to Fenris to see if you can help us corrale some help in cleansing Crithea. Are you familiar with Fenris, Colonel?"

        "No, Commissar, I'm not."  
        Gaunt pulled his cap firmly over his head, levelling it over his brow. "Look it up. See if it's in those data-slates of yours." He turned and marched back to the archway. "I think  you'll like it there."

        As he left, the Commissar uttered a brief prayer at one of the plinths. Footsteps rang around the vaulted walls as Gaunt left the wolf to continue his meditation.


End file.
